“Prisoners”

Rating: R

When: Opens Friday

Where: Wide release

Running time: 2 hours, 33 minutes

★★

There is no greater fear for parents than to have their young child go missing. Just thinking about it keeps people up at night, pondering the horrible world of “what if.” Most parents would do absolutely anything to get their child back, and it’s that notion that is at the heart of “Prisoners,” the new thriller from French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, which marks his English-language debut.

It’s an intense experience for the viewer, one that’s well-crafted and beautifully shot, featuring strong performances from its leading men, Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. But for all its successes, it’s a mystery that’s let down by its own screenplay, which begins as a story that has intriguing and seriously complex moral and ethical implications before giving way to what is a fairly by-the-numbers, beat-the-clock serial-killer thriller.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a middle-class contractor in a fading Pennsylvania suburb. Keller’s a manly man, an outdoorsman who prays for the best but prepares for the worst. The worst comes along when his daughter Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) goes missing on Thanksgiving, along with Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons), the daughter of his good friends Nancy and Franklin (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard).

Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is called in, and the suspicious RV that was parked not far from where the girls were last seen is found and its driver arrested. He turns out to be Danny Jones (Paul Dano), an intellectually disabled young man who lives with his aunt (Melissa Leo). There’s no trace of the girls, however, so the police are forced to release him. Keller’s an intense guy at the best of times, and he eventually kidnaps Danny, vowing to torture him until he divulges the girls’ location. As this is going on, Loki is doing his damnedest to solve the case the old fashioned way, and trying to do it as fast as possible.

Keller’s quandary is the core of “Prisoners,” a movie that is very much in the same vein of other crime procedurals such as “Se7en” and “Zodiac.” “Prisoners” is not, however, as good as either of those, primarily because, like any rogue cop, it finally goes ahead and just throws the rule book out the window.

But those rules are in place for a reason, and if you’re going to break them, it has to be in a way that makes sense. Exposition that pops up in the middle of the movie is inexcusable, and for a movie that’s all about solving puzzles, at the end of the day (or, at least, the end of the movie), they come together a little too neatly, and I was able to piece them together faster than the characters themselves.

Additionally, picking out the actual culprit doesn’t take great powers of deduction, just an understanding of how typical thrillers eventually play out. That’s “Prisoners” greatest crime, actually, that it betrays its own potential, because there’s actually much here to admire. Jackman has always been good at bellowing, and Gyllenhaal has created a layered character with a history you’d love to know more about. This is a tense, white-knuckler that taps into universal fears and does so in a way that actually challenges the audience’s assumptions about what might happen and whether the characters are making decisions they could actually support.

“Prisoners” does all that very well — for a while. And then it runs out of gas, and the ethical complexities turn out to be little more than a tantalizing MacGuffin that is marginalized so the loose ends can be nicely tied up. There’s nothing worse than a mystery that is solved via a lucky accident, and essentially, after all the red herrings, that’s how “Prisoners” comes together.

None of that takes away from the work of Jackman and Gyllenhaal, nor that of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, but it is a bit of a screenwriting crime, one that won’t be solved by the time the credits finally roll.

Anders Wright writes about movies for U-T San Diego. Email him at anderswright@gmail.com